Fwd: Fw: Sun Microsystems Laboratories releases an open source speech synthesizer

[Tony Baechler]

Hello.  Basically, for those who do not want to read, this is a speech 
synthesizer in Java.  Could this work with Speakup?


>Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 6:01 PM
>Subject: FWD: Sun Microsystems Laboratories releases an open source
>speech synthesizer
>
>
>Greetings,
>
>Attached is an announcement from my colleague Willie Walker of the Sun
>Labs
>Speech Group of the availability of FreeTTS, a speech synthesis engine
>written in the Java(tm) programming language and released under a
>BSD-style
>license.
>
>Regards,
>
>Peter Korn
>Sun Accessibility team
>
>
>-------- Original Message --------
>From: Willie Walker <william.walker at sun.com>
>Subject: Sun Microsystems Laboratories releases an open source speech
>synthesizer
>
>Greetings!
>
>It is my pleasure to announce that the Sun Microsystems Laboratories
>Speech Group has made its FreeTTS (http://freetts.sourceforge.net/)
>speech synthesis engine available via open source through a BSD-style
>license.  The engine is written entirely in the Java(tm) programming
>language and provides partial support for the synthesis portion
>of the Java Speech API 1.0 specification.
>
>You can read more about this project in an article on
>http://java.sun.com:
>
>     http://java.sun.com/features/2001/12/flite.html
>
>An excerpt from the article is as follows:
>
>   "Researchers from Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington,
>    Massachusetts have created an open source speech synthesis engine
>    written entirely in the Java(tm) programming language. This
>    high-performance software converts text to speech. You type it;
>    your workstation speaks it. And the whole world benefits.
>
>    Willie Walker, Paul Lamere, and Philip Kwok combined the Festival
>    Speech Synthesis System, with its robust architecture, and the Flite
>    engine, with its succinct algorithms, to create FreeTTS, a
>synthesizer
>    that delivers both power and flexibility.
>
>    The team ported Flite, programmed in C, and Festival, written in C++
>    and Scheme, to the Java programming language. FreeTTS generated
>    intelligible speech four weeks after researchers wrote the first line
>    of code. But even with such a short development time, the team did
>not
>    compromise results. FreeTTS outperforms both original applications,
>    executing nearly four times faster than Flite in some environments."
>
>For the Sun Labs Speech Group,
>
>Willie Walker,
>Manager and Principal Investigator